WASHINGTON – U.S. President Barack Obama won a commanding victory and a second term in the White House late Tuesday evening as a landslide of major swing states fell to the man who vows to lead Americans into a more liberal future.

Emerging from the fog of more than $6 billion in election expenditures that produced a shrill of endless campaign advertising, U.S. voters went to polls in such large numbers that voting continued in some eastern states well past 11 p.m. As the results flowed in, voters quickly showed they were ready to give Obama a second chance to right the struggling economy and cement his social programs, including public health care.

After taking a concession call from Republican rival Mitt Romney, Obama took to a stage in Chicago and addressed thousands of supporters who had gathered there to celebrate. He urged Republicans and Democrats to work together to improve the economy and fix the deficit.

In a country of 300 million people, democracy can be “noisy and messy and complicated,” Obama said, but “these arguments that we have are a mark of our liberty.”

“We can never forget that as we speak people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, a chance to cast their ballots like we did today.”

For the first time since the Democratic convention in August, he also made reference to climate change, saying Americans have to make sure their children “can grow up in a country that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”

When Obama took Ohio and Pennsylvania, it showed the industrial heartland of America had rallied to his side. Obama also took Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado and Wisconsin, the home state of Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

Romney had nursed a brief lead in battleground Virginia, but as the evening progressed Obama overtook him. By then it was academic.

After Ohio was declared Democrat, Romney headquarters in Boston appeared stunned, initially refusing to concede the state. But the state had been declared for Obama even before the results had come in from Democrat-rich urban areas. One hour after Ohio had been declared for Obama, Romney phoned Obama to concede the race.

Shortly after, Romney appeared in front of his supporters, telling them, “this is the time of great challenges for America and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation.”

He called on Republicans and Democrats alike to “put the people before the politics” and “reach across the aisle to do the nation’s work.”

It was still not certain whether Obama also won the popular vote that would give him an unquestioned mandate to push his programs through congress, but he was holding a razor-thin lead.

All other states had largely stuck to the script. Romney held substantial leads in southern and Midwestern states from Texas to the Dakotas including Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia. Obama took all of the New England states plus New Jersey and New York and held comfortable leads in his home state of Illinois and in Michigan. In the West, he won the electoral college prize of California with its 55 votes.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper congratulated the president on his re-election.

“I look forward to working with the Obama Administration over the next four years to continue finding ways to increase trade and investment flows between our countries,” Harper said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Democrats solidified their hold on the Senate, gaining four seats and losing two others in the upper chamber. In Missouri, Democrat Claire McCaskill defeated Republican Todd Akin, who lost ground early in the campaign when he claimed that women who are victims of “legitimate rape” cannot have babies.

In his concession speech, he said “the source of America’s great freedom is a loving God.”

Democrat Joe Donnelly took an Indiana Senate seat from Republican Richard Mourdock, whose fortunes collapsed last week when he announced his opposition to abortion on demand even in rape cases.

Democrat Elizabeth Warren defeated Republican incumbent Scott Brown in the Senate race in Massachusetts. Brown was the Tea Party favourite who in 2010 won Sen. Ted Kennedy’s seat.

As predicted, the Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives, meaning Obama will continue to have to deal with a divided congress that in the last two years has blunted his ability to complete his social and environmental legislative programs and refused to set a budget.

Allegations of voter manipulation and suppression flowed from both sides soon after voting opened Tuesday. In Ohio, a judge threw out a Democrat lawsuit charging that new software used in electronic voting machines could secretly alter ballots.

Romney continued to campaign up to the last minute with unscheduled stops in Pennsylvania and Ohio. It is unusual for a candidate to hold campaign rallies on election day for fear of disrupting workers’ efforts to get people to the polls. Democrats characterized Romney’s last-ditch efforts to lure voters were acts of desperation.

The election results suggest the Republican Party has failed to keep up with the changing demographics of America. The growth of the Hispanic community in Florida, Colorado and New Mexico has favoured the Democrats as much as 73 per cent. The rise of the black and Latino communities as solid Democratic voting blocs together with the majority of women who lean Democrat does not bode well for the future of the Republicans, who continue to move deeper toward the far right with each election. Commentators claim that if the Republicans continue to lose the immigrant vote, Texas – with its growing Latino population – will turn into a swing state.

Romney’s promise to lower taxes for the rich even when they are at almost record lows did not find support among these voters in the industrial heartland. They see a widening gap between rich and everybody else. His opposition to environment regulations and his promise to “get rid of” public healthcare, parental care and privatize social security as a way to reduce the deficit found support primarily among older white men.

Democrats on the other hand had an uphill battle fighting the socialist label and the charge that they are leading America to within an inch of the apocalypse with their promise to increase taxes on the rich, cement the new Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), strengthen economic stimulus programs and the government’s involvement in education and retraining of American workers.

The abortion issue also played a prominent role in this election. Romney’s policy of ending freedom of choice in all abortion cases including rape further defined the huge ideological gap dividing the two sides and the growing opposition of women to his party.

The election marks the last campaign of Obama’s political career and Monday night he held his last rally in Iowa, the state where he first announced his candidacy for president in 2006 and promised Americans a kinder, more liberal country – a new America. His main battle in recent months has been not so much with Romney but with the more than eight per cent unemployment rate and that fact that many of his supporters believed he failed to deliver on his promise to make American a more egalitarian state.

Studies show that as America has slowly emerged from the 2008 economic collapse, most of the wealth has again trickled up to the one-percent, abandoning middle class Americans in their struggle to stay afloat.

Obama himself has probably been kept afloat by Romney and his far-right policies. With this loss, Romney is also staring at the end of his political career. A multimillionaire, he spent the past five years, 10 months and three days campaigning for the second time for the U.S. presidency.

His struggle was with his credibility both within his own split-personality party and with Americans as a whole. Despite his deep commitment to the Mormon religion, he is often characterized as a man without any core beliefs, someone whose pitches micro-target the group he is addressing like the hedge fund salesman he used to be.

This election gave new importance to the presidential debates, each of which was watched by more than 60 million Americans. It was their only chance to see the two candidates face off on the major issues and became the most crucial trend points of the campaign.

Obama gradually corrected his ship. There was a new seriousness to his words. Four years was not enough to undo the hand that he was dealt, he said. He had stopped the war in Iraq, set the stage to pull out of Afghanistan, killed America’s arch enemy Osama bin Laden, and enacted a public healthcare system and equal pay for women. Give me four more years to finish the job, he begged.

With the help of running mate Joe Biden and surrogate Bill Clinton, he got it.

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